gone astray,—­in preparing those roses and ribbons, and other lightnesses for her young girl.  It should have been all sackcloth and ashes.  Had it been all sackcloth and ashes there would not have been this terrible fall.  But if the loved one would now come back to sackcloth and ashes,—­if she would assent to the blackness of religious asceticism, to penitence and theological gloom, and would lead the life of the godly but comfortless here in order that she might insure the glories and joys of the future life, then there might be consolation;—­then it might be felt that this tribulation had been a precious balm by which an erring soul had been brought back to its due humility.

But Wordsworth and Thomson, though upon the whole moral poets, had done their work.  Or, if not done altogether by them, the work had been done by the latitude which had admitted them.  So that the young wife, when she found herself breathing the free air with which her husband surrounded her, was able to burst asunder the remnants of those cords of fanaticism with which her mother had endeavoured to constrain her.  She looked abroad, and soon taught herself to feel that the world was bright and merry, that this mortal life was by no means necessarily a place of gloom, and the companionship of the man to whom Providence had allotted her was to her so happy, so enjoyable, so sufficient, that she found herself to have escaped from a dark prison and to be roaming among shrubs and flowers, and running waters, which were ever green, which never faded, and the music of which was always in her ears.  When the first tidings of Euphemia Smith came to Folking she was in all her thoughts and theories of life poles asunder from her mother.  There might be suffering and tribulation,—­suffering even to death.  But her idea of the manner in which the suffering should be endured and death awaited was altogether opposed to that which was hot within her mother’s bosom.

But not the less did the mother still pray, still struggle, and still hope.  They, neither of them, quite understood each other, but the mother did not at all understand the daughter.  She, the mother, knew what the verdict had been, and was taught to believe that by that verdict the very ceremony of her daughter’s marriage had been rendered null and void.  It was in vain that the truth of the matter came to her from Robert Bolton, diluted through the vague explanations of her husband.  ‘It does not alter the marriage, Robert says.’  So it was that the old man told his tale, not perfectly understanding, not even quite believing, what his son had told him.

‘How can he dare to say so?’ demanded the indignant mother of the injured woman.  ’Not alter the marriage when the jury have declared that the other woman is his wife!  In the eyes of God she is not his wife.  That cannot be imputed as sin to her,—­not that,—­because she did it not knowing.  She, poor innocent, was betrayed.  But now that she knows it, every mouthful that she eats of his bread is a sin.’